Digital Home Thoughts: Tiny PC, Big Aspirations

"It’s certainly compact enough to get lost under your HDTV, just 5.7 x 3.9 x 2.0 inches and made of sturdy metal and silver plastic. Although there are rubber feet for standalone use, you can also VESA mount it to the back of your display. Ports include audio in/out/microphone on the front, together with two USB 2.0 and a miniUSB, then VGA, HDMI, two further USB 2.0 and gigabit ethernet on the back."

Tiny PCs are nothing new. In fact, there are some PCs which are considerably smaller. Traditionally smaller PCs have also offered smaller processing power though recently, these liliPCs have been growing more and more powerful. The ARTiGO A1100 is no exception though it bucks the trend of most recent PCs that go with Atom CPUs. VIA is the little known competitor to AMD and Intel offering x86 compatible CPUs with really low power profiles. Unfortunately, it seems as if the A1100 seems better designed for office type applications, lacking in multimedia strength. For those of you thinking this might make a great tiny server to tuck away in a small corner, there are other options as well, even smaller, like the SheevaPlug. The A1100, which a nice concept, looks like it may be seeking a niche to fill.